PA Consulting wins a 2021 Amazon Web Services Global Public Sector Partner Award

PA Consulting, the consultancy that’s bringing ingenuity to life, has won the 2021 Amazon Web Services’ Global Public Sector Partner Award for most valuable Amazon Connect deployment. The award has recognised PA’s work for launching the Wellbeing Automated Call Service (WACS) for Hampshire County Council, in just seven days. To develop WACS as quickly as possible, PA turned to proven technology, Amazon Connect, the cloud contact centre system from AWS.

With over 50,000 vulnerable people shielding at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hampshire County Council urgently needed to understand their support needs. It meant having to contact the residents regularly and this demand far exceeded the capacity of the Council’s traditional call centre teams.

WACS uses the database of shielding individuals to make an automated call asking people whether they need support or not. Anyone who replies ‘yes’ is immediately connected to a human call handler to arrange help. Using WACS, the Council was able to contact up to 2,500 people every day and by the end of the last lockdown in March 2021 almost 200,000 outbound calls had been made. As a direct result, thousands of clinically extremely vulnerable Hampshire residents received help, with tasks such as receiving food or medical supplies

Stuart Outterside, head of learning disabilities, adults’ health & care, Hampshire County Council says: “PA’s ability to move fast and achieve practical results was impressive. The team worked carefully and conscientiously to help us develop the solution, always with a sense of concern for the people on the shielded list.”

Steve Carefull, social care technology expert, PA Consulting says: “WACS is a brilliant example of PA bringing together deep insight into the social care world with our expertise in digital solutions development to address an urgent challenge on a huge scale. Our preference for working collaboratively meant we had all the right people from the outset and were able to launch an effective solution in a little over one week. WACS is a source of immense pride for the PA, AWS and the Council teams because it had such a positive impact on the lives of so many people going through a very difficult time.”

Longer term, the automated call service has exciting potential to help manage a range of different challenges, for example ‘back to work’ readiness calls to tens of thousands of employees post-pandemic, the review of social care packages that the council provides, and a prompt for people to protect themselves by arranging their flu jab.